


Not the Best Time of My Life

by tawg



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-16
Updated: 2011-03-16
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:09:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawg/pseuds/tawg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jimmy winds up in his own past, in need of help and able to provide some comfort.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not the Best Time of My Life

Jimmy doesn’t know where to go. Dropped off, vacated, left like a burnt out car at the side of the road. He is in Chicago. He’d recognise the city anywhere – he’d gone to East-West University (and had stuck out like a sore thumb, until he transferred to Chicago State in his final year). This city hasn’t changed much, he can still recognise the art on the bus shelters.

Wait.

He buys a newspaper, and stares at it. 1994.

Nineteen ninety- _four_.

If there is a way for a human to kill an angel, he is going to find it, and then spend the next fifteen years perfecting it, so when Castiel comes knocking looking for a ride...

Right. Ninety-four.

That means that he’s in Chicago. Not just Jimmy the ex-vessel, put up on blocks until some new tires could be found. There is the past-that-is-apparently-now Jimmy, too.

It’s starting to rain, and in all honesty, Jimmy needs a meal and a month of showers.

And if he can’t look after himself, well. He’ll have to convince his self to look after him.

*

He manages to find his old/current student apartment. He even manages to sneak in the back door like the people living above and below and around him had done. Better late than never, he thinks.

He worries for a moment that maybe his past self won’t be in, and then rolls his eyes at the thought. Who is he kidding? He was _always_ in. If he wasn’t in his apartment of an evening, he’d be down behind the building, making friends with the stray cats. Jimmy catches a glimpse of his reflection in a window. He certainly looks like a stray.

He knocks on his own door, staring at the unblemished paint. While the doors along the rest of the hall are decorated with photos and posters and notes, he had always kept his door trinket free. Partly out of respect for the ‘no ruining the paintwork’ rule, and mostly because he never really acquired trinkets anyway. He hadn’t even met Amelia yet.

There is a shuffling from inside, and the door opens. Jimmy stares into his own face. And his own face stares back, mouth agape and his hair sticking up at all angles, like he’s just gotten out of bed.

“I’m sorry,” Jimmy says. “But I really need to use your bathroom.”

*

Jimmy has to admire his own hospitality. He’s been given free reign of the bathroom – and he had eyed off the bath, but he hadn’t fit into it as a scrawny twenty year-old, so it probably wouldn’t hold him now. And when he was clean and mostly dry, he was given boxer shorts and an old jumper to wear.

He never knew he’d be so happy to wear something other than that blasted suit.

He was even given a toasted sandwich (tuna and mayo), and a can of cheap but not awful beer.

“You’re me, right? Am I having a psychotic break or something?”

“No,” Jimmy replies, his mouth full. “That won’t happen for nearly two decades.” He looks up, into his own, startled eyes, and feels an odd kind of removed self-pity. He’d always been a trusting person. “No, you’re fine. It’s my end. Things will happen, reality gets a little bent,” he waves a hand airily. “And eventually you’ll find yourself in my shoes, understanding why I can’t exactly explain.”

His younger self nods. “So... You need somewhere to crash? I’m studying for finals, but-”

“Don’t worry too much about the finals,” he tells himself. “We only do so bad because we stress about them too much.”

His younger self nods again, and bites at his thumbnail. Jimmy watches, and the younger Jimmy watches right back. He hadn’t realised that he’d hunched in on himself so much back then. Afraid of being the tallest person in the room, though how much that would change. He was pretty scrawny, long legs and bony wrists, and his eyes looked so big in his face.

He wonders what his younger self thinks of his future – wrecked and wrung out, starving-hungry and desperately alone.

“Mind if I steal your bed?” he asks.

“Sure,” his younger self replies. “I’ll be up for a few hours still.”

Jimmy nods, and slinks off to bed. He’ll be furious at Castiel for dumping him and petrified about how he’s going to get home in the morning.

*

He wakes up to the feeling of a body sliding into bed next to him, and automatically rolls towards the new source of heat, wrapping an arm around a slender waist and burying his nose in Amelia’s hair. The body next to him goes rigid.

Wait.

Jimmy pulls back, and sees his own, confused face staring back.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, his voice thick with sleep. And then he goes right back to cuddling his younger self. “Let’s face it,” he says, his words lost in his younger self’s hair, “we need a hug.”

His younger self laughs, that awkward, uneasy sound, but after some shifting and wriggling they make themselves comfortable. A little cocoon of warm, sleeping Jimmys.

And throughout the night, legs tangle and heads angle to rest on a knot of shoulders, arms slung around each other. The skin of their stomachs touching because Jimmy had thrown that sweater off and across the room when it got too hot, and because the other Jimmy sleeps in an old camp shirt that is too big and rides up as he twists in his own embrace.

*

Jimmy wakes up at what must be something like four in the morning to the feel of his younger self brushing fingertips ever so slightly against the curve and angle of his shoulder blade. He nuzzles against his younger self, his stubble rasping against the soft young skin along the inside of his younger self’s upper arm. He scratches his blunt fingernails across his younger self’s stomach, and feels the skin there twitch in response. Who said you couldn’t tickle yourself? He smiles at the thought, and smooths the palm of his hand over the same skin, a little drunk on body heat and intimate contact.

His younger self moves a hand up, and hesitates for a moment, before combing his fingers through Jimmy’s hair. Awkward petting, at first, but Jimmy tilts his head down, and runs his own hand up his younger self’s side, over the dip of his waist and across the lines of his ribcage. He feels fingernails drag across his scalp, and drags his knuckles over his younger self’s chest in response, his thumb catching on a puckered nipple, and drawing a shallow gasp from that mouth that is so very much his own.

Jimmy raises his head a little, just enough to look his younger self in the eye. His younger self licks his lips, and Jimmy watches the movement curiously. It’s a little easier than staring into those wide, dark eyes.

“Is this... is this weird?” his younger self asks, his voice a whisper.

Jimmy stares at his lips for a moment longer, before raising his gaze. “It’s not the weirdest thing you’ll ever do,” he replies in low, quiet tones.

They stare at each other for a long, long moment before the fingers resting on the back of Jimmy’s head twitch, and he’s pulled up into a chaste, awkward kiss. And Jimmy thinks, well, it’s not the first time he’s touched himself. He laughs a little at that, a small huffing noise against his younger self’s mouth, and when that mouth opens in question, Jimmy kisses it. A real kiss. Gentle, but firm, his tongue running across that line in his younger self’s mouth where the bottom lip turns into the inside of a mouth. His younger self inhales a gasp through his nose, and then wraps both his arms around Jimmy, opening his mouth and wanting more. Jimmy has a hand on his own, twenty-year-old hip, his thumb tracing the line of the bone there.

It strikes him that the person he’s kissing is a handful of years older than Claire.

It feels good to kiss someone, though. To bump noses and share a breath, to hear those little noises that were made when he did something right, to make those noises in response as hands tug at his hair, as his younger self hooks an ankle around Jimmy’s calf, tugging Jimmy into a sprawl over him, as his younger self bends his knee, pressing his thigh between Jimmy’s legs, moaning into a kiss that is becoming deep and messy and frantic, arching up.

He’s still a virgin, Jimmy realises. Because he was both waiting for the right one and convinced he’d spend his life in a small, crummy apartment, forever alone.

In about eighteen months, he’ll be engaged.

Jimmy wonders if it is even possible to take his own virginity, but his younger self’s hands are wandering all over his chest, sliding down his back and grabbing at hips, feeling the lines of his stomach and tracing the hair below his navel. Nervous hands mapping out the terrain of years to come, pressing in the places he likes to be pressed, touching him where he wants to be touched. Jimmy sucks at his younger self’s bottom lip before pulling his mouth away, kissing and sucking at the soft skin below the pretty line of his own jaw, biting gently at an earlobe, licking at the hot skin behind the ear, and below him his younger self arches and whines and grabs onto him, demanding more.

Jimmy braces himself on one bent elbow by his younger self’s head, and trails a hand down the hot skin of a torso, feeling the rise and fall of ribs as his younger self pants, feeling the stretch and contraction of muscles as hips roll, feeling a clench of muscles in his stomach as he trails his fingers lower and lower, pausing for a long moment before bumping the backs of his fingers against tented boxer shorts. Gentle strokes with the back of his knuckles, the heel of his thumb, running the length of his pinky finger down that hot hard line, studying his younger self’s face as teeth sink into a plump lower lip, as eyes scrunch up with need and then go slack and joyous as odd, exploratory touches became firmer, more assured. As his younger self tugs at material and wriggles out of his shorts, and Jimmy wraps his hand around firm flesh, as he strokes and tugs and his younger self lets his mouth fall open, shameless moans and gasps that turn into an honest sob as Jimmy dips his head and licks at an exposed nipple, as he teases it with his mouth as best he can even as his younger self struggles to tear that old t-shirt off.

Jimmy wants to make himself feel good. A selfish selflessness, wanting one night in this crummy apartment that is a good memory, wanting to give himself one moment in a very crappy year where he feels wanted and needed.

More than anything, he wants to stop feeling so damn alone.

His younger self shoves a hand into the slit at the front of Jimmy’s boxers, grabbing at his cock with a lack of grace or finesse, but so much enthusiasm despite the awkward angle and the confinement of thin cotton. But it feels good, so good, and Jimmy’s toes curl as long fingers stroke his shaft, the bump of large knuckles pressing through the flesh of a palm and catching with each stroke at the head of Jimmy’s cock, a thumb pressed just below his slit, smearing precome back and forth with small, absent movements.

And it makes perfect sense that his twenty year old self would be so much better at this.

Jimmy bites down on the nipple at his mouth, bites across smooth, white skin, loving the way his younger self swears, a broken shaky sound that is surprised and aroused, and followed up almost immediately with, “Oh, fuck, again.”

Jimmy’s never really heard his own voice during sex before. It’s rough, and throaty, and this pitch is somehow off because he’s spent his own life hearing his voice from inside his own head. He bites down on the other nipple, a sharp violent press of teeth that makes his younger self whine and fist his hand in Jimmy’s hair, and beg and keen and say “Yes,” over and over again. Jimmy kisses him hard and rough, just to shut him up, swallowing that word down and keeping it inside himself. He jacks his hand faster, angry at the person he was and the person he became, and whoever the hell he is now, a tangled mess of legs and underwear and shaking arms as he jacks himself without mercy, as his younger self twists his wrist at the end of each stroke and makes him moan. As their two voices get tangled and knotted together, mirroring each other but never quite sounding the same.

And Jimmy is jacking himself, hard and fast and his younger self is tensing up, is damn near vibrating underneath him and snapping his hips up over and over, and somehow they find a rhythm, a beat that Jimmy keeps as his younger self buries his face against the arm that Jimmy is holding himself up with, biting at that soft, vulnerable flesh beside his elbow and licking the wound after with hot, wide strokes of his tongue, his mouth open obscenely wide. His face scrunches up and he presses his nose against Jimmy’s arm, his forehead, hiding his face as he comes and comes hard, a high, animal noise tearing out of his throat and Jimmy pumps him hard and constant, milking everything his can out of this one moment of seeing himself lose control, this crazy moment of power over his own body.

And even while he’s coming, the Jimmy beneath him keeps his hand on Jimmy’s dick. Not stroking anymore, just squeezing and twisting and it hurts but it hurts so good, and Jimmy thrusts his hips into that tight grip, what little muscle he has is bunching up as his body goes taut, as he groans through clenched teeth and comes and comes until it feels like he’s being torn apart. Until his skin is cold with sweat and his body aches in a good way, and he’s so tired that even his soul feels ready to rest.

He collapses down beside himself, and can’t help but chuckle as his younger self frowns and tries to clean up two different streaks of come painted across his chest. With tissues bunched up and thrown away, Jimmy rubs a flat hand over the moist, slightly sticky skin, catching a few remaining drops with the pads of his fingers, rubbing the stain into his own flesh.

“You should go to sleep,” he says, once again curling around his younger self. The tips of his limbs are buzzing as he wraps them around curved shoulders, as he feels the bumps of his own spine under his hands. His younger self relaxes, stretching and coiling and carving a place for himself along Jimmy’s side, head tucked under Jimmy’s chin. His breathing evens, bit by bit, into long slow breaths, and he’s asleep. Asleep while Jimmy stares across the familiar room in the darkness, tries to ignore the buzzing in his ears, the rattle of glass in the windowpane.

A voice is on him, pressing him down and opening him up, and from that space deep inside him emerges that word he had so viciously swallowed earlier. Like a traitorous butterfly, a stolen _“Yes,”_ escapes from his lips, and the room is lost in a blaze of white light.

*

Castiel quietly redresses his vessel without haste or concern. He is glad that his vessel came to no harm while he was away, but that had been the whole point of the location – proximity to a spare, should he need it. He looks down at the sleeping version of his vessel, both more and less complicated than the skin he wears now. He reaches out with two fingers, and touches its forehead, stealing the memories away.

History can’t be changed.

And, despite Jimmy’s concerns and his wishes, he will never truly be alone.


End file.
